Steinbeck Quotes

“If you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.
[…]
If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
― John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“Many are the stories I have heard about myself. I have mistresses I have never met. When I hear that I am a sodomist and a zoophalist then I shall know that I have reached the high point of fame, but I suppose I can hardly expect such exaltation for many years.”
― John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty.
Before the year is over, I think I will be looking back longingly on the Gulf of Lower California — that sea of mirages and timelessness. It is a very magical place.

It is cold and clear here now - the leaves all fallen from the trees and only the frogs are very happy. Great cheering sections of frogs singing all the time. The earth is moist and water is seeping out of the ground everywhere. So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.
Maybe you can find some vague theology that will give you hope. Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.

There it is — It is interesting to watch the German efficiency, which, from the logic of the machine is efficient but which (I suspect) from the mechanics of the human species is suicidal. Certainly man thrives best (or has at least) in a state of semi-anarchy. Then he has been strong, inventive, reliant, moving. But cage him with rules, feed him and make him healthy and I think he will die as surely as a caged wolf dies. I should not be surprised to see a cared for, thought for, planned for nation disintegrate, while a ragged, hungry, lustful nation survived. Surely no great all-encompassing plan has ever succeeded. And so I'll look to see this German plan collapse because they do not know enough to plan for everything.”
― John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“Now as always—humility and terror. Fear that the working of my pen cannot capture the grinding of my brain. It is so easy to understand why the ancients prayed for the help of a Muse. And the Muse came and stood beside them, and we, heaven help us, do not believe in Muses. We have nothing to fall back on but our craftsmanship and it, as modern literature attests, is inadequate. May I be honest; may I be decent; may I be unaffected by the technique of hucksters. If invocation is required, let this be my invocation—may I be strong and yet gentle, tender and yet wise, wise and yet tolerant. May I for a little while, only for a little while, see with the inflamed eyes of a God.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Man hates something in himself. He has been able to defeat every natural obstacle but himself he cannot win over unless he kills every individual. And this self-hate which goes so closely in hand with self-love is what I wrote about. - in a letter to George Albee”
― John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“Only mediocrity escapes criticism.”
― John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”
― John Steinbeck , Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“It is snowing again. Confound it, will the winter never be over? I crave to have the solid ground under my feet. You cannot understand that craving if you have never lived in a country where every step was unstable. It is very tiresome and tiring to walk and have the ground give way under you at every step.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“I try to write what seems to me true. If it isn’t true for other people, then it isn’t good art. But I’ve only my own eyes to see with. I won’t use the eyes of other people.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“You know pretty well that I don’t think of myself as an individual who wants very much. That is why I am not a good nor consecutive seducer. I have the energy and when I think of it, the desires, but I can’t reduce myself to a unit from which the necessary formula emanates.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Isn’t it funny, my two pet horrors, incapacity and ledgers and they both hit at once. I write columns of figures in big ledgers and after about three hours of it I am so stupefied that I can’t get down to my own work. I can see very readily how office workers get the way they are. There is something soddenly hypnotic about the columns of figures.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“We can find no man unit reason for the sudden invasion of Europe by a race of Hun shepherds, who were transformed overnight into a destroying force, a true phalanx, and in another generation had become shepherds again, so weak that an invasion of Tartars overwhelmed them. We can find no man unit reason for the sudden migration of the Mayas. We say Attila did it or Ghenghis Khan, but they couldn’t. They were simply the spokesmen of the movement. Hitler did not create the present phalanx in Germany, he merely interprets it.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Religion is a phalanx emotion and this was so clearly understood by the church fathers that they said the holy ghost would come when two or three were gathered together. You have heard about the trickiness of the MOB. Mob is simply a phalanx, but if you try to judge a mob nature by the nature of its men units, you will fail as surely as if you tried to understand a man by studying one of his cells. You will say you know all this. Of course you do. It has to be written in primer language. All tremendous things do.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“We only feel the emotions of the group beast in times of religious exaltation, in being moved by some piece of art which intoxicates us while we do not know what it is that does it.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“That is all I can think of. If there was more to be answered it is in the stomachs of those khaki-colored devils in the garden. They are eating the fence now. The appetite of a puppy ranks with Grand Canyon for pure stupendousness.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Well, I went into the mountains and stayed two years. I was snowed in eight months of the year and saw no one except my two Airedales. There were millions of fir trees and the snow was deep and it was very quiet. And there was no one to pose for any more. You can’t have a show with no audience. Gradually all the poses slipped off and when I came out of the hills I didn’t have any poses any more. It was rather sad, but it was far less trouble. I am happier than I have ever been in my life.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“That seems to be all there is about me. It is such a simple life to tell about. Most of our tragedies we have to make up and pretend.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“A writer and his work is and should be like a surly dog with a bone, suspicious of everyone, trusting no one, loving no one. It’s hard to justify such a life but that’s the way it is if it is done well.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“in addition to eminence, superiority has two other qualities or rather three—simplicity, clarity and generosity.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“the warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Oh! honey–I feel sick. I guess maybe it is the subsurface panting because you are not here.”
― Elaine Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“I am afraid much of my existence is going to be more or less alone, and I might as well go into training for it. It comes on me at night mostly, in little waves of panic, that constrict something in my stomach. But don't you think it is good to fight these things?”
― Elaine Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters